Flexibility use to be a perk until they started telling you what hours you're working, with a faulty system to boot. The majority of people giving high ratings are full time employees I'm sure. How rude for someone to say that if you expect a work from home job to require only a PC and watching Netflix all day, you are mistaken. These are the type of mentalities you deal with. Who in their right mind with think such a thing?!
Appen is unprofessional, has ineffective communication with it's staff and is EXTREMELY controlling from a distance. Guidelines change constantly and you are required to study and keep up with the changes WITHOUT pay. And then when I was paid, they determined, via their system how many hours I worked. When I would not go for it, they laid me off saying that no work was available and yet they consistently had ads up for the same position.
As an Independent Contractor, you are supposed to be paid for the work you produce! I was required to do a certain amount of queries within a particular time frame in which I did. I tracked my own time which wasn't exact to their system so that did not want to pay me for my work. I disputed it every time and was able to get paid through strenuous and stressful effort until they no longer wanted to be bothered with someone whom wouldn't accept their tactics. It's was really unfortunate because I worked for them for almost 3 years.
Also as an IC, you should be able to negotiate your "contract" but it is stagnant regardless of performance. They pay I started with was the pay I ended with. Truly, I should have been classified as an Employee based on their level of control, pay structure and continuous training, monitoring, correspondence and auditing. This would have entitled me to more benefits.
